The Unsent Letter - Amy Daniels

A neighbor’s seemingly innocent comment got Amy Daniels thinking, and led her to what might be considered a “self-diagnosis” of a devastating disease called Systemic Scleroderma.

Amy and her husband Mark live a stone’s throw away from the shores of Lake Michigan in a suburb just north of Milwaukee. One day while taking a walk near the lake, her neighbor remarked that she looked very tan. Amy didn’t think much about the comment at first, but later on it got her thinking about something she really didn’t want to think about.

During the previous several months, she’d started experiencing numbness and tingling in her hands, a sensation that caused pain when she went to turn off the lights of her young daughters’ room at night. That symptom, along with the comment about her skin turning “more tan,” kept bugging her. But like most people, she tried to put it out of her mind.

The problem was, Amy worked as a nurse. One of the most difficult jobs she and her co-workers faced was caring for patients with systemic scleroderma. One woman in particular was nearly inconsolable. Her mouth was “frozen” open, a result of her skin being drawn “tight” by the disease that attacked the tissues of the body. She was in constant pain.

One night she came home from work and told her husband Mark that “…if there was ever a disease I do not want to get, it’s scleroderma.”

This is where the story of Amy Daniels takes a horrific, unpredictable turn. In the following months, Amy and her family faced the reality of her worst nightmare. “The Unsent Letter” is a story of real human drama, of life and death. It is the story of a wife and mother like any other who wrote a letter as she prepared to die—then experienced the lifesaving cure that can be found in adult stem cell therapy.